Low income families aren’t buying $10k cars. They’re lucky if they get a decent $1k car.

“I do believe that gas taxes need to be higher since in most cases they haven’t increased in years, and to keep up with inflation, they should.”

There’s one key difference. When you bribe a politician, you have a reasonable expectation he’ll stay bought. When you’re lobbying, it only works until the next lobbyist gets his ear, so there’s a constant stream of ‘campaign contributions’.

Anyone who can spend $100 a month like that is almost certainly in the top 1% globally by income, and guaranteed the top 2-3%. Not-rich people don’t even spend your total yearly outlay on a car, and then they expect/hope/pray it’ll last them longer than a year.

A wee bit stronger than the US, though.

You’re just making things up. EU data protection laws are serious.

No, according to Jason if you write a novel in Word, and save it as a Word document - or Openoffice, or Notepad, if you prefer - it should not be protected by copyright.

This is embarrassing. How is this still up? You’ve got the story entirely wrong, both on the relevant EU laws and this particular one.

Er, Kyle, you’ve forgotten your ‘paid by Putin’ tagline again.

No, you’re getting a 5y/o BMW. Shouldn’t cost the earth to maintain, but everything will cost a bit more than on a cheaper brand.

Depreciation curves for Range Rovers are skewed by the fact they’ve mostly come to the end of their economic lives and been scrapped by 5 years in.

“a used Nissan Leaf is a fantastic and underrated deal”

Clutches don’t usually need to be replaced in the normal lifetime of a car, these days. Once you get up to high mileages then automatics can also have problems. It’s a lot cheaper to replace a clutch than a gearbox which has gone wrong, and manual gearboxes don’t usually break unless someone’s done something really…

I mostly drive my MGF. It has electrically assisted power steering. Designed by a dying Rover group on a non-existent budget in 1994 or something. It’s entirely unnoticeable - if I didn’t know it was done that way (because no hydraulics at the front end for conventional PAS), I’d never have noticed.

I think you mean... ‘There’s no logic’.

You will never wear out a clutch if you know how to drive a manual properly. Slipping the clutch noticeably and using plenty of gas to pull away is how you do it when you’re learning and/or in an unfamiliar vehicle. Once you’ve got the hang of it clutch slip is negligible in any situation (except maybe reversing uphill…

Talk about giving bad advice...

That’s not quite right. The point of DRS is that it only comes into play when a slow car is being followed by a much faster car, and there’s a gap in front. In normal racing in the middle of the pack DRS has no impact because everyone gets it at the same time.

Seriously? ROFL. You know Nick Denton was fired by the DM for ‘lack of ethics’?

That story fits the popular stereotype, but it’s completely the opposite to the truth.